The Whisperer in Darkness, by H.P. Lovecraft

Chapter 8

Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or how much of what ensued was sheer
dream. If I tell you that I awakened at a certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you will merely answer that I
did not wake then; and that everything was a dream until the moment when I rushed out of the house, stumbled to the
shed where I had seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient vehicle for a mad, aimless race over the haunted hills
which at last landed me — after hours of jolting and winding through forest-threatened labyrinths — in a village which
turned out to be Townshend.

You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declare that all the pictures, record-sounds,
cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception practiced on me by the missing Henry
Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired with other eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoax — that he
had the express shipment removed at Keene, and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though,
that Noyes has not ever yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near Akeley’s place, though he
must have been frequently in the region. I wish I had stopped to memorize the license-number of his car — or perhaps it
is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself,
know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills — and that, those influences
have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as possible from such influences and such emissaries is
all that I ask of life in future.

When my frantic story sent a sheriff’s posse out to the farmhouse, Akeley was gone without leaving a trace. His
loose dressing gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages lay on the study floor near his corner. easy-chair, and it could
not be decided whether any of his other apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed missing, and
there were some curious bullet-holes both on the house’s exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this
nothing unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer
odour or vibration-sense, no foot-prints in the road, and none of the problematical things I glimpsed at the very
last.

I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among people of every kind who had known Akeley;
and the results convince me that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion.’ Akeley’s queer purchase of dogs and
ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone wires, are matters of record; while all who knew him —
including his son in California — concede that his occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency.
Solid citizens believe he was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere hoaxes devised with insane
cunning and perhaps abetted by eccentric associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his statements in every
detail. He had showed some of these rustics his photographs and black stone, and had played the hideous record for
them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice were like those described in ancestral legends.

They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasingly around Akeley’s house after he found
the black stone, and that the place was now avoided by everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-minded
people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever closely
explored either. Occasional disappearances of natives throughout the district’s history were well attested, and these
now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley’s letters had mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who
thought he had personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West River, but his tale was
too confused to be really valuable.

When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution.
Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race — as I doubt all the less since reading that a new
ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers,
with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing “Pluto.” I feel, beyond question, that it is
nothing less than nighted Yuggoth — and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens
wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are
not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.

But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I have said, I did finally drop
into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream which involved monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me
I cannot yet say, but that I did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My first confused impression was
of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This,
however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions begin with the voices heard from the study below.
There seemed to be several speakers, and I judged that they were controversially engaged.

By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the nature of the voices was such as to make all
thought of sleep ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had listened to that accursed phonograph
record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two of them. Hideous though the idea was, I knew that I
was under the same roof with nameless things from abysmal space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous
buzzings which the Outside Beings used in their communication with men. The two were individually different — different
in pitch, accent, and tempo — but they were both of the same damnable general kind.

A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected with one of the detached brains in
the cylinders. There was as little doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the loud, metallic, lifeless voice of
the previous evening, with its inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its impersonal precision and
deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable. For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind
the scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me; but shortly afterward I reflected that any brain
would emit vocal sounds of the same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the only possible
differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were two
actually human voices — one the crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian
tones of my erstwhile guide Noyes.

As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly-fashioned floor so bafflingly intercepted, I was also conscious of a
great deal of stirring and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I could not escape the impression that
it was full of living beings — many more than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact nature of this
stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to
move across the room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something about it like a loose,
hard-surfaced clattering — as of the contact of ill-coordinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more
concrete but less accurate comparison, as if people with loose, splintery wooden shoes were shambling and rattling
about on the polished board floor. Of the nature and appearance of those responsible for the sounds, I did not care to
speculate.

Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated words — including the
names of Akeley and myself — now and then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but
their true significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions from
them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal
conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious
how this unquestioned sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s assurances of the Outsider’s
friendliness.

With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though I could not grasp much of what any
of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices,
for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial
loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. Noyes’s tones exuded a kind of
conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of
Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.

I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the
words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.

That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in the haunted
farmhouse among the daemoniac hills — lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket
flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept
me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the
ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must
have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.

Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide After all, what had I heard beyond things which
previous information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted
to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that
fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish
fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something
which my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have
protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified
fears.

Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills with the letters and
pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to
know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have
occurred between Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was
not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused — had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to
drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their
promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We must get out of this before it would be too late.
If he lacked the will power to make the break for liberty. I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I
could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage in Brattleboro. I had noticed
it in the shed — the door being left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed past — and I believed there was a good
chance of its being ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the
evening’s conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his
indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could not stay in this place till
morning as matters stood.

At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution
more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight’s
aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and
flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to
awaken the only other occupant of the house.

As I half-tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that
he must be in the room on my left — the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the
study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the
flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper’s face. But in the next second
I hastily turned them away and commenced a catlike retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as
well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing was to find out
as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door
after me; thereby lessening the chances of awakening Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected
to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favorite resting-place. As I
advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight
and hearing machines attached, and with a speech machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This,
I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a
perverse impulse to attach the speech machine and see what it would say.

It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments could not fail to
disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare
meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed on
the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only
regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible
doubts and questions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.

From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the
great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously
the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought
so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his
necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What
had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been
strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused,
letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had
taken.

Would to Heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it
turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite
awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever
heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of haunted mountain — that focus of transcosmic
horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.

It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to
lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag
myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some
unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or
Rimbaud or the drawings of Dore, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am
lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously
discovered.

As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing
for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the
empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later
on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one
to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt — moments in which I half-accept the scepticism of those who
attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and delusion.

The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps
to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope — devoutly hope — that they were
the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with
its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider . . . that hideous repressed
buzzing . . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf . . . poor devil
. . . “Prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill . . .

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance — or identity — were the
face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

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